For the last year, South Africa’s mining industry, particularly its flagship platinum-group metals sector, has been wracked by labour unrest and debilitating strike action.

Such has been the scale of the violent industrial action that 44 miners lost their lives in Marikana last year and the sector has been forced into a significant contraction trend to the extent that the recorded output of 2012 was some 16% lower than the previous year’s production.

But such violent strike action is not a new phenomenon. In fact, for more than a century, South Africa’s mining sector has been plagued by a series of considerably violent and debilitating strike action, which, on more than one occasion, brought the national economy to its knees.

As the great French writer, Gustave Flaubert, once said, “our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times”, it is a worthwhile exercise to reflect on some of the country’s other more prominent historical mining strikes in order to give some perspective to the current crisis.

As one would expect, the scene of South Africa’s very first mining strike action was the diamond mining city of Kimberley. The issue that ignited this mining strike in the closing months of 1883 was the enforcement of regulations permitting mine owners to strip-search all their employees, both black and white, which were introduced in an attempt to stamp out the scourge of diamond theft on the mines.

From the earliest days, the theft of diamonds from Kimberley’s four mines and the trade in illicit gems were extraordinarily rife: it is estimated that, during the first decade of mining, between one-third and one-half of all mined diamonds were stolen and smuggled out of Kimberley.

While diamond theft had always been an intolerable feature of diamond digging, it was only in the early 1880s that, in the face of spiraling mining costs and plummeting profit margins, drastic action was taken to stamp out the illicit trade.

It became obvious to all stakeholders that there could be no hope of stamping it out until thieving was stopped at its source. That, in turn, meant that something would have to be done to prevent stolen diamonds from leaving the mines because, as long as workers were allowed to come and go as they pleased without being searched, theft would continue.

Thus, in November 1882, the mining company directors drew up a set of new searching regulations, which were given legal force by the governor of the Cape colony two months later. Intimate strip-searching was to be applied to black and white workers in all four mines, but with some exceptions and some differential applications. Managers and those who worked on the margins of the mines, including engine drivers and mechanics, were exempted from the provisions of the new regulations. Therefore, the men most affected by the new system were the white overseers and the black labourers who worked in the mines. These men were not only searched daily, but were also to wear uniforms, which, in the case of the white overseers, were pocketless overalls. For the black labourers, these were mealie sacks.

While no one could possibly deny that some white employees on the mines took part in IDB, all white workers denied that this gave the companies a right to subject them to the same rigours as blacks. They argued that “it would be a disgraceful and degrading thing if they should be compelled to disrobe in the searching house and so lowered in the sight of natives”.

In the face of such discontent, the employers and their white employees reached a compromise in terms of which the overseers, who were threatened by a high unemployment rate, agreed to submit to searching by officials of the detective department, but only on condition that it was done out of sight of black workers and that they did not have to wear uniforms.

However, within a few months, the rudimentary searching system had little effect in curbing the theft of diamonds and, as a result, the company directors were compelled to extend searching to the margins of the mines and required all men to submit to close examinations of their bodies on entering and exiting the mining areas.

On October 14, the day the new regulations were to be enforced, the white mechanics and engine drivers, who strongly opposed such proposals and who, in response, formed a trade union called the Artisans and Engine Protection Society (which can be regarded as the first mining-related trade union in South Africa), went on strike, declaring that work would only be resumed once the searching rules had been rescinded. They gained the support of all other white workers in the mines as well as the support of the black labourers, who were quite eager to assist anyone who would help get rid of the searching system. Such was the level of support for the strike that all but a handful of brave black and white employees reported for duty and the four mines were deserted.

The strike lasted just over a week. Apart from an abortive attempt to rush the Bultfontein and Dutoitspan mines, there were very few incidents. A few mining companies managed to continue working with the help of a skeleton staff, and valiant efforts were made to keep the pumping machines going and prevent the mines from being flooded.

However, there was no escaping the seriousness of the action. As the workers refused to budge on their demands, the employers had no choice but to rescind the stripping clause pertaining to white employees but leave intact the searching regulations pertaining to all black workers. Thus, in that first battle between labour and mining capitalists, the white workers were the clear victors.

In many ways, that first miners strike was typical of many other early twentieth-century stirkes in that it had little to do with wages or working hours – its real purpose was to uphold the ‘dignity’ and superiority of the white man over his black counterpart – a sad but recurrent theme in South African history.